Time transcripts of FrankStory
[00:00:00:00] Interviewer: Okay, so go ahead and tell us about yourself.
[00:00:03:26] Frank: My name is Frank. I'm a fourth-year Classics major here
[00:00:08:06] at The Ohio State University, [ clears throat ],
[00:00:11:02] and I was born in 1990.
[00:00:14:21] I: Okay, go ahead and tell us about your experience with the classics.
[00:00:21:03] F: So I came into Ohio State as a Mathematics major
[00:00:25:12] and I was just taking Latin
[00:00:27:12] as my foreign language.
[00:00:31:21] I'd...I had always been interested in ancient languages and cultures and such,
[00:00:39:14] partially that is probably due to the video game series
[00:00:42:29] "Age of Empires," and partially I'm not really sure where it came from.
[00:00:48:09] But it's kind of always been there.
[00:00:51:15] So yeah.
[00:00:52:23] After a couple of quarters of, let's say,
[00:00:57:10] "less than stellar" performance in math,
[00:01:00:16] I decided that I really just liked Latin better.
[00:01:04:24] So I changed my major and started doing that.
[00:01:09:03] Umm...
[00:01:12:17] I...I had finished, like, through...
[00:01:15:29] So the introductory series, there were four courses in it
[00:01:18:14] and I had finished the first three by the time I changed.
[00:01:21:21] So I guess my first REAL experience of Latin
[00:01:28:01] outside of a textbook, uh...
[00:01:31:07] Not outside of a textbook, but outside of a "Teaching You Latin" textbook
[00:01:37:14] was Virgil's "Aeneid."
[00:01:40:16] Like, that was the first Latin in the wild that I came across.
[00:01:44:24] And I loved it.
[00:01:50:14] It was very difficult.
[00:01:54:10] I think...
[00:01:59:07] In any language, but especially in those you don't get to speak,
[00:02:03:07] vocabulary is always going to be an issue,
[00:02:07:16] and especially at the beginning when you're first coming across, like...
[00:02:10:23] Because Virgil's like the Shakespeare of Latin,
[00:02:13:14] like you're not reading, like... children's stories.
[00:02:17:27] You have to start at, like, the top
[00:02:20:14] because that's pretty much all that's left, and it's left BECAUSE it was the top.
[00:02:25:07] So people decided it was worth keeping.
[00:02:28:12] So...it was definitely kind of a shock,
[00:02:32:03] like, how bad I was at it.
[00:02:36:02] I still don't think I'm GOOD at it, but I'm much better now.
[00:02:41:27] So yes, that was...that was Latin. Just kind of a...
[00:02:45:26] I didn't know what to expect, and I was very...
[00:02:52:02] taken aback at what it was actually like.
[00:02:57:25] It's kind of sterile, let's say, Latin, as compared to Greek.
[00:03:04:14] So Greek, [ chuckle ] I started in the beginning of my third year.
[00:03:09:28] In the introductory sequence, there were only three courses,
[00:03:13:09] so I took all of those in a year,
[00:03:15:08] and the first Greek that I met in the wild was Plato's "Apology," and...
[00:03:26:09] if Latin is difficult due to its sterility and
[00:03:30:22] [ clears throat ]
[00:03:32:14] the fact that it almost seems like it's...
[00:03:35:16] I don't know about fake, or...
[00:03:37:17] it seems like it's really constructed and...
[00:03:40:21] uh...I don't know...
[00:03:47:03] Constructed [ chuckling ], I guess, that's the only word I can think of.
[00:03:51:13] Greek seems much more like a real [ chuckling ] language, I guess.
[00:04:01:22] It's...
[00:04:04:08] It was a little more difficult than Latin even, coming across it at first,
[00:04:08:04] maybe only because I only had three quarters of introductory stuff instead of four,
[00:04:12:07] or maybe because it's harder,
[00:04:15:07] which [ chuckling ] I think the latter is probably the case.
[00:04:21:02] But I like it better.